The
prime beneficiary of the Iowa caucuses was the battered Iowa economy,
pulling in $100 per voter in the caucuses, spent by the candidates mostly in
tv advertising. In terms of political import history instructs that the
victory in these caucuses offers a high likelihood of imminent political
extinction. It’s true that eons ago, in 1976, Jimmy Carter won there, thus
helping to put Iowa on the political map (along with R.W. Apple Jr. of the
New York Times, who achieved one of the few contacts with political
reality of his entire career by predicting that the peanut broker from
Plains would do well).

Gephardt won in the Iowa
caucuses in l988 and the elixir of that meaningless victory sent the
Missouri congressman back to Dubuque time and again, each time to endure
humiliation , whose finale came on Monday night. Gephardt was supposedly
labor’s candidate, or at least of the leaders of the industrial unions which
sent hundreds of organizers into the state, helping their man to his scrawny
10.8 per cent showing. The service and government workers in the SEIU and
AFSCME were drafted by their leaders to support Howard Dean who limped in
third, far behind Senators John Kerry and John Edwards.

Dean had the endorsement of
Iowa’s senator Tom Harkin who won the Iowa caucus in 1992, also of Jimmy
Carter who characteristically undercut his nod by saying that “he called me,
I didn’t call him.” At the time of his endorsement Harkin said he preferred
Gephardt, but thought Dean had a better of winning the presidency.

The only good news for Dean
after his Iowa debacle is that he is no longer the front runner, and can run
as an outsider again. He was supposed to bring into “the electoral process”
fresh blood in the form of college students and web surfers. But Kerry beat
him 35 percent to 25 percent among college-age students and by the same
margin among those with college degrees.

A week before the Iowa
caucus a liberal, very senior Democratic US congressman from northern
California was speculating to friends that Dean might well be “McGoverned”,
referring to the way the Democratic Party leadership in 1972 pulled the rug
out from under the South Dakotan for being far too liberal and antiwar. This
senior Democrat recounted how Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd had snarled in
one private party conclave that Dean “should step aside and let the adults
take over.”

Aside from being
vociferously against Bush’s prosecution of the war in Iraq, Dean’s threat in
DNC eyes is that he has been raising money independent of the Party’s
control. Dean spent $3 million of his campaign money in Iowa.

These days the Iowa
caucuses are rigged to favor candidates in good odor with the DNC, which is
part of the reason why Dean did badly. It could be that Dean never was the
front-runner in Iowa that brought such panic to the Clinton establishment
marshaled by Terry McAuliffe at the Democratic National Committee. The press
played him up, as did Karl Rove.

But if you believe exit
polls, 58 percent of caucus attendees had made up their minds more than a
week ago, and of that number 33 percent voted for Kerry and only 26 percent
for Dean. Edwards was the choice of 19 percent of those early deciders, and
got 35 percent of those who made their pick within the last week.

What’s Kerry got going for
him, apart from the money of his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, who has propelled
the sputtered Kerry campaign forward on a sea of ketchup dividends? Not
much. Kerry is a chronic fence straddler on issues. Gore Vidal hit it on the
head when he remarked that Kerry “looks like Lincoln…[pause]… after the
assassination.

But if Howard Dean
represents one nightmare for the party’s powerbrokers in the DNC, his
slippage in Iowa may portend another. The DNC gerrymandered the primary
process by front-loading it, with the proclaimed intent of having an assured
nominee by mid-February. But now it easy to envisage a sequence whereby Dean
wins in New Hampshire, with Wesley Clark close behind. Edwards wins the next
week in South Carolina, with only Gephardt and Mosley Braun definitively out
of the race.

One comfort for Dean comes
in the form of the idiocy of the DNC in pushing for a senator as its
nominee. After all the last man to go directly from the US senate to the
White House was John F. Kennedy, who stole the election in 1960 courtesy of
his father’s money and clout.